A manufacturing plant or refinery (an “industrial facility”, or “IF”) may have several Control & Instrumentation (C&I) systems including one or more distributed control system (DCSs) or Programmable Logic Controller (PLCs) are a combination of complex software and hardware used for monitoring and controlling process parameters in industries including pressure, temperature, and flow. Such IF are widely used in industries such as petroleum refineries, paper and pulp, and power plants. Most IF work on an Ethernet topology. Ethernet refers to the family of computer networking technologies covered by the IEEE 802.3 standard, and can be run over both optical fiber and twisted-pair cables.
In modern plant engineering, the C&I devices link all plant components. The C&I devices include I/O modules that generally receive physical parametric (e.g., pressure, temperature) representations from sensors as standard current signals (4 mA to 20 mA). These signals are utilized by other various C&I devices including for regulating, safety, data acquisition and comparator systems for control, safety and instrumentation purposes. Specifically, conventionally various comparators compare the incoming 4-20 mA signals received from sensors against stored/set “set points” and create outputs used for plant safety, regulation, interlock or/and operation.
The IF generally comprises components including server and clients (computers with operating systems such as WINDOWS/UNIX/Linux), and embedded nodes acting as controllers or gateways. All these C&I system components have their own IP address and communicate with each other typically using Ethernet-based protocols. In a typical IF setup, there could be hundreds of such system components (server, client, embedded nodes) connected through various network switches, routers etc., and the types and numbers of such system components differ from customer to customer.
There is no known automated way to enable discovery of all the nodes present in the C&I of the IF so that a complete network topology for any of the C&I systems or for the entire IF cannot be drawn. Accordingly, a project engineer manually draws the network topology referring to the actual connectivity of the C&I system components and hands over the static network topology document generated to the plant maintenance engineer post commissioning of the plant.